Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review最新文献

The intertribal Musket wars that spread throughout Māori society in the 1820s and 1830s have received much attention from historians. This is also true of the history of trade between New South Wales and New Zealand occurring at the same time. However, at present, the link between these two phenomena remains poorly established. This article draws on the primary material available about the trans-Tasman arms trade from a relatively untapped source, Sydney newspapers, revealing the surprising extent of this commerce and the fact that firearms imports peaked in the early 1830s. This information necessarily requires revision of our understanding of the Musket wars themselves.

Rugby league flourished in the Aboriginal settlements run by the Queensland government in the 1920s and 1930s, as officials relaxed policies of segregation and isolation to allow Aboriginal teams to travel within the state. Revenue from the games, at times significant sums, went to government trust accounts and not directly to the settlements. Available data on this sporting income and government spending policies reveals an exploitative system, ethically comparable to Stolen Wages and reflecting the dispossession of Aboriginal Queenslanders in this era. While sport bolstered community pride, these exploitative dimensions qualify its contribution to Aboriginal wellbeing.

Ownership, financing, and usage of stadiums are key issues that affect the commercial operations of sports leagues. Stadiums that are owned by leagues may generate deadweight losses if they are not used to full capacity. We (1) model demand to measure the impact of the Victorian Football League building a privately-funded stadium (VFL Park); (2) then use counterfactual scenarios to estimate social saving from different venues and playing days, and determine whether further welfare gains would have been possible. VFL Park provided greater control over revenue, but further institutional change was needed to fully exploit potential commercial gains from the stadium.

Using 1880 s panel data from Yamanashi and Gifu prefectures in Japan, we estimated the diffusion factors and total factor productivity (TFP) in machine-reeling technology in Japan's silk-reeling sector. While the cost of distance through the traditional highway from the Shimosuwa-shuk post town in the Nagano Prefecture has a negative correlation with technology diffusion, the correlation of silk production per population is positive. Machine-reeling technology is raw-material-intensive and does not show increasing returns to scale. While the TFP in Yamanashi is higher than in Gifu, machine-reeling output expansion is larger in the latter.

Using Fiji as a case study, I conduct the first cost accounting of government-run Indian indentureship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I analyse multiple official data sources and estimate the total cost of bringing Indians to Fiji was £926,851, roughly a fifth of Fiji's reported expenditure. Businesses funded 92.6% of this cost. However, business payments to the government do not appear in official Blue Books. Incorporating business payments shows that both official revenue and expenditure were underestimated by 15%. My results show how one part of colonialism was funded and how colonial fiscal capacity may be underestimated more broadly.

The 1980s were an outrageous time in Australia's business history. This paper re-examines this era of misconduct, assessing the role of interlocking directorates for corporate governance of diversified business groups. Professional interlocked executives—those with professional training, executive status and mobility between member firms—enabled the takeover culture of the time, and allowed managers to ignore promised strategic benefits and redirect associated firms towards speculative share ownership. These results demonstrate the importance of board independence for corporate governance, and the way that expertise has been weaponised within managerial capitalism to encourage trust in risky and exploitative corporate structures.

This article examines non-farm employment in the context of Chinese rural institutional change, based on evidence from discrete-time logistic models for event history analysis using the Life History and Social Change survey. We find the transition to non-farm sector rose rapidly during the Great Leap Forward and market reform, while the Cultural Revolution saw it reach the lowest ebb. While male advantage prevailed exclusively during the Cultural Revolution and early marketization, education possessed a stable positive effect in all historical periods. Although the returns to different kinds of political capital vary along with institutional dynamics, intergenerational reproduction was greatly reduced after the Cultural Revolution.

This article re-reads Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population for his explicit discussion of men and women, masculinity and femininity. A feminist reading is possible, but not undertaken here. Rather, the purpose is simply to demonstrate how ‘gender’ was Malthus's own object of inquiry. Historical actors, perhaps especially economic thinkers, often considered gender far more fully and explicitly than almost all subsequent analysts of them. It therefore remains not just insufficient, but empirically erroneous not to inquire into how ‘men’ and ‘women’ were considered, constructed, instructed, symbolised or valued by the historical actors we study, including those in the political economy canon.

During 2021 the journal published 15 research articles and summaries of three dissertations. The March issue contains three studies in Australian economic history and a far-reaching piece about ‘Big Economic History’ by long-time contributor Peter Lloyd. The July issue celebrates the many scholarly contributions of Professor Jeffrey G. Williamson. Consulting editor Andrew J. Seltzer introduces the issue with an appreciation of Professor Williamson's rich career and research contributions in the issue from distinguished colleagues on three continents. In November special editors Duol Kim and Andrew J. Seltzer bring together six powerful surveys examining the economic history of China, India, Japan, Korea and Thailand.

I am delighted to announce that the 2021 best paper is ‘Always egalitarian? Australian earnings inequality 1870–1910’. Panza and Williamson trace the origin of Australia's relatively egalitarian earnings distribution to the middle third of the nineteenth century. They attribute an unexpected decline in earnings inequality 1870–1910 to the fast growth of schooling and skilled labour supply relative to changes in the demand for skilled labour. The editorial team and the Board congratulate the authors of the three papers and especially Laura Panza and Jeff Williamson!

The journal's Associate Editors are Sumner Lacroix (University of Hawai'i-Mānoa), Dan Li (Fudan University), Chicheng Ma (University of Hong Kong), Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (University of New England), Jim McAloon (Victoria University of Wellington) and Florian Ploeckl (University of Adelaide). Their efforts are crucial for the success of the journal. They bring the journal to the attention of early career researchers, make it attractive to authors by turning papers around quickly and support authors through multiple revisions (if necessary) to achieve the highest possible standards of scholarship. Consulting Editor Andrew J. Seltzer (Royal Holloway) heroically managed two special issues during the year. Dr. Claire Wright (Macquarie University) has developed our social media presence. We are all grateful for the efforts of this fine team.

The work of the journal depends critically on a large number of referees, listed below, who carefully read and report constructively on individual manuscripts: Vellore Arthi, Frank Bongiorno, Myung Soo Cha, Thanyaporn Chankrajang, Martin Chick, Jari Eloranta, Rob Gillezeau, Hanhui Guan, Tim Hatton, John Hawkins, Greg Huff, Li Jianan, Monica Keneley, Rebecca Kippen, Chun Chee Kok, Yuzuru Kumon, Sumner La Croix, Cong Liu, Peter Lloyd, Ye Ma, Jakob B. Madsen, Jim McAloon Christopher Meissner, Stephen Morgan, Kentaro Nakajima, Ilan Noy, Dorian Owen, Joshua Price, Michael Quinlan, Evan Roberts, Andre Sammartino, Martin Shanahan, Richard Sicotte, John Singleton, Andrew Smith, Anand Swamy, John Tang, Benno Torgler, Brian Varian, Jessica Vechbanyongratana, Jonathan Wadsworth, Sophie Xuefei Wang, John Wilson and Hongjun Zhao.